The Global Entrepreneur

Best Practice

BY DANIEL J. ISENBERG

The Global Entrepreneur

Tim Ellis

A new breed of entrepreneur is thinking across borders – from day one.

FOR A CENTURY AND MORE, companies have ventured abroad only after establishing themselves at home.

Moreover, when they have looked

overseas, they haven’t ventured too

far afield, initially. Consumer healthcare company Johnson & Johnson

set up its first foreign subsidiary in

Montreal in 1919 – 33 years after its

founding in 1886. Sony, established

in 1946, took 11 years to export its

first product to the United States,

the TR-63 transistor radio. The Gap,

founded in 1969 – the year Neil Armstrong walked on the moon – opened

its first overseas store in London in

1987, a year after the Challenger space

shuttle disaster.

Companies are being born global today, by contrast. Entrepreneurs don’t automatically buy raw materials from nearby

suppliers or set up factories close to their headquarters. They

hunt for the planet’s best manufacturing locations because

political and economic barriers have fallen and vast quantities

of information are at their fingertips. They also scout for talent

across the globe, tap investors wherever they may be located,

and learn to manage operations from a distance – the moment

they go into business.

Take Bento Koike, who set up

Tecsis to manufacture wind turbine

blades in 1995. The company imports

raw materials from North America

and Europe, and its customers are

located on those two continents.

Yet Koike created his globe-girding

start-up near São Paulo in his native

Brazil because a sophisticated aerospace industry had emerged there,

which enabled him to develop innovative blade designs and manufacturing know-how. Tecsis has become

one of the world’s market leaders, having installed 12,000 blades in 10 countries in the past decade and racked up

revenues of $350 million in 2007.

Standing conventional theory on its head, start-ups now

do business in many...